Scene 4 Summary

This scene is set in the same environment as the first: the forecastle of the ship. The sailors have come off their shift, cleaned themselves up and eaten – all except for Yank, who is still dirty and hungry. He is preoccupied with thoughts of the confrontation in the engine room. The sailors – speaking again like a Greek chorus - tease him about all his thinking, and Paddy is convinced that in the moment Yank saw Mildred, he fell in love.

Long has a different perspective: he reveals to the men that Mildred is the daughter of the man who owns the ship, the man who is keeping them captive. Long believes that the Engineers were showing off the sailors as though they were animals in a zoo. He tries to get the sailors to join a kind of mutiny against the capitalism that...